If I had a magic wand

In the first few days of this year, one feeling has lingered on my mind. It’s the feeling that I’m at the age where self-agency matters than ever before. In 2025, I came across a post online where someone suggested the reason why some people do well within the confines of paid employment but are unable to replicate same in personal projects, life admin and other aspects of their life may be due to the lack of self-agency. In many ways, I agree with that assessment.

Self-agency is defined as the sense that actions are self-generated. It is one of those traits that become more important with age, but don’t correspondingly improve with age. In fact, with the many distractions that are available in our lives today, it’s easy to cede one’s self-agency without being conscious of it. I’ve come to a personal conclusion that I don’t have enough of self-agency. Or that I don’t have as much of it as I’ll like to. Some of the people close to me may think this is debatable, I think not.

When I turned 24, the theme for my new age was to be “unafraid”. It’s a constant note to myself over the next couple years that I can and should take more risks. The problem with declaring such a grand plan to be unafraid in life is that it goes in hand with other things that need to be fixed. In the past 6 months, I’ve actually done some conscious reflection and realised that my fears don’t exist in isolation. In most cases, I found that my fears were due to uncertainty of the outcome of the activity or situation I was scared of. I also found the perceived uncertainty to be inversely correlated with my familiarity with the activity.

When these fears arise, there’s a (natural?) tendency to fall into a do-nothing state. This do-nothing state shows up in many ways for me - sometimes I just spend more time doing things that I can easily do on autopilot instead, sometimes I procrastinate. Believe me (you don’t really have to), I’ve done some risky things that I’m proud of, I’ve also been consistent at things that required self-agency, but it’s almost like the mind forgets one’s capability to do these things more often than it remembers.

Another fact I’m coming to terms with is that the way to remind the mind that it can do is to keep it in a state of doing. And I don’t really mean some shareholder-value doing. Just doing something challenging that requires consistent effort. And that’s what I’m going to do this year. This post is more a note to self, something I can hopefully come back to when next that fear pops up.

You must wonder what all of this has to do with the title of the article. It doesn’t have much to do with it, really. But what inspired this writing was a thought in my head - “if I had a magic wand for this year, I would 10x my self-agency”.